


Around the World In An Unspecified Number of Days

by aldiara



Category: Alles was zaehlt
Genre: Alles was zählt - Freeform, Crack, Crossover, F/M, Gen, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-14
Updated: 2010-12-14
Packaged: 2017-10-13 16:28:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/139323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aldiara/pseuds/aldiara





	Around the World In An Unspecified Number of Days

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Wildepet](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Wildepet).



France is a bust, as he secretly knew it would be. Britanny, the focal point of his mad burst of hope, feels hostile to him, stymieing him with its close-mouthed secrecy, odd customs, standing stones and – in its remote corners – languages he's never heard of, Gallo and Breton, utterly defeating his halting French. No one has seen, heard or sniffed a single trace of a German woman in some ivy-wreathed cottage hidden away, waiting.

Marian loses track of dates quickly, but there is in him an ingrained knowledge of the days of the week, unerringly telling Monday from Sunday and all the days between. He'd put it down to barkeep's instinct, but he's always had this knowledge, even when he was a child back in Turkey and the days had different names. He doesn't know why.

It's Thursday when he leaves the indifferent peninsula of Brittany and drifts south, towards the smell of lavender and rosemary and the one person he always does know how to find.

"Always the same old story with you, isn't it, Yeddin? _Cherchez la femme_." Etienne runs a finger around the rim of his wineglass. They're sitting at the small wooden table down in his wine cellar, surrounded by silence and darkness and smooth, dusty bottles, like two guards in some medieval dungeon. Etienne is smiling, a bit drunk, a bit amused, a bit rueful, and for the first time in a long while Marian feels less than miserable. He tells Etienne about Jenny, lists their many ups and downs in long, rambling detail, explains at length why he needs to find her, to make her see he's worth another chance. It's early morning by the time his words dry up and his pounding head sinks to the table. He feels Etienne's hand rest on his own, stroking it lightly, and attempts to pet it clumsily in return.

"You're a good friend, Sero," he slurs, "a good… good… friend."

He thinks Etienne says something in return, but it's too quiet and possibly French, and anyway he's too drunk to pay attention.

He leaves for Mexico the next day, a Friday, and Etienne sees him off with a list of names that might come in handy, and a firm embrace. He's clean-shaven and annoyingly clear-headed, while Marian can barely get his breakfast to stay in its designated location. Etienne heads back inside the moment the taxi pulls away, and Marian knows a moment of irritation that he didn't stay and wave.

~~~

In Buenos Aires he stalks an American tourist for three days. She's wearing dark sunglasses and a scarf wrapped over her brunette hair, and the day he finally gets to see her eyes is the day he is arrested. Another Friday. The woman's eyes are angry and light blue, her nose sharp and long – so different from Jenny's, he should have seen that earlier, he supposes – and she threatens him with lawsuits that will haunt his children's children. Before Marian can tell her he's unlikely to have any of those, he's dragged away and spends the weekend in a jail with cockroaches the size of rats and rats the size of cats. When they release him, it's with a stern warning to stay away from Americans.

~~~

His savings are dwindling rapidly and he spends the rest of his search of South America with more frugal means of transport: rickety buses, donkey carts, hitchhiking, often walking. The contacts Maximilian von Altenburg has given him prove fruitless. Eventually he ships out on a cargo ship from Puerto de la Cruz on the Venezuelan coast, heading for the Caribbean and eventually Florida.

~~~

The last name of potentially useful contacts on Etienne's list takes him to the American Midwest. It turns out the man on the list is dead, but Marian spends the better part of a week with his sons, who seem more than sympathetic to his quest. The three of them drive from one small town to the next in the elder brother's lovingly maintained Impala, which Marian admires with a practised eye. They sleep in cheap motels and follow obscure leads whose source the brothers are loath to share. Marian finally gets suspicious when they quiz him, very earnestly, about the nature of his dreams, especially sexual ones. "Have you been feeling particularly drained of energy lately?" the younger one – Sam – asks insistently. "Any incidents of nocturnal emission where the ejaculate went missing?"

Marian stares at the young man in horror. "Any _what_?!"

The older brother, Dean, throws his hands up impatiently. "Dude, he wants to know if this skank you're hunting has been hoarding your spunk. Did you not listen when we told you about succubus habits?"

Marian's world – the relatively safe world, where the only supernatural occurrence is the inhuman speed with which his son can empty a plate of food – tilts on its axis. "I… I thought that was code," he says weakly. "I'm only looking for my girlfriend."

The Winchester brothers stare at him in near-identical confusion. "We thought _that_ was code," says Sam, while Dean slaps his hand on the table and rants at him about wasting their time. When he finds out the truth – these lunatics actually believe they're some kind of demon hunters – Marian hightails it out of there, hitching a ride on the next long-haul truck heading east.

~~~

He's in New York, following a lead about an amnesiac woman working as a lounge singer, when Simone Steinkamp rings him. Something she forgot to tell him: An Austrian passport, issued in the name of Julia Müller. The passport's gone, Frau Steinkamp says, elated to the point of near-hysteria. It's gone, she can't find it anywhere, and maybe…

Marian hangs up, spares one hour to check out the singer – who turns out to be nineteen and red-haired, and not Jenny at all – and books a flight to Vienna.

Several hundred Julia Müllers later – it must be the single most popular name in the country, Marian thinks morosely, and how like Jenny to make it as difficult as possible for him – he's in a room in a small, run-down pension on the outskirts of Innsbruck, reluctantly admitting that if she _is_ Julia Müller now, she's not here. He has his map of the world spread out on the bed and a bottle of Enzian clutched in his hand. The alpine schnapps tastes biting and foreign, full of earthy spices. He scrawls red X's onto the map, marking the places he's been: Most of Europe (except for Iceland), parts of South America and the U.S., North Africa.

There's one huge splotch on the map that remains unexplored, and he supposes that after all these countries, all these fruitless cycles of weekdays, it is, after all, the most promising place to look. It's Wednesday, and it's time to head for Russia.

~~~

By now, his savings are long gone, and he's deep into his credit limit, not too far from maxing it out. He refuses to think about what he'll do when that happens. Call Etienne, perhaps. Get fake credit cards, like the Winchesters did. Something will work out. He goes to Moscow and Yakutzk, and eventually tracks down the elusive Resopolov. The white-haired choreographer refuses to speak to him directly, and the bored-looking interpreter he's hired informs Marian that Mr. Resopolov is not in the habit of hiding runaway young women, nor is he aware of or interested in where this particular one might be found.

As Marian trudges out of the spotless ballet room, disgruntled, one of the young skaters takes him aside and tells him in heavily accented English that there's an international junior skaters' team in Vladivostok, and that he might try his luck there. Their choreographer is Canadian, she says; perhaps he can help Marian.

~~~

Funny, but he never thought of the parts of Russia that lie near the sea, much less the Pacific. To him the Pacific means the American west coast and far-off places like Australia, New Zealand, Samoa. Russia is endless tundra and wolves, the silent forests of the taiga that swallowed Jenny's plane. Yet here he is, looking out from the dirty window of his hotel room across the wintery waves of the Pacific. It's a Friday in March, and he feels jetlagged and more displaced than usual; he almost feels as if at some point in his travels, he slipped off his familiar X-marked map into some utterly foreign world, uncharted territory. The grey harbour below him might as well be on another planet.

~~~

The next day, he takes the tram to the address the receptionist at his hotel scribbled on a piece of paper. The wealthy parts of Vladivostok look much more inviting than the part he's staying in. The skating centre is an imposing old building with arched windows, jutting oriels and steep gables. Out front is a small square with an ice sculpture: a female skater, her bluish body bent impossibly far back in the graceful curve of a layback spin.

His boot heels – tracking soil from how many countries now? – clack on the marble floors as he follows the signs – bilingual, thank god – to the ice rink. A group of teenage skaters is on the ice, doing warm-up laps and simple figures. Their trainer watches them from the boards at the far side of the rink, and at the sight of her, the air whooshes out of Marian's chest in a cold, painful gush.

It's her. She's wrapped in a thick duffel coat, a scarf and a red cap he recognises, her cheeks flushed with the cold and her eyes brilliant even at a distance. She's leaning back against the boards with utter confidence, calling out the occasional instruction to the skaters in near-flawless English. She looks vibrant and happy. She looks… herself.

Marian stares and stares, unblinking, until movement in the shadows behind her draws his eye, as it does hers. A tall man steps down into the rink beside her, dips his head close to hers, says something in her ear. She laughs. He kisses her, casually wrapping an arm around her shoulders. She strokes the stubble on his cheek, smiling, and that's when Marian recognises him. Air slams back into his lungs, but it's solidified, cutting air, tiny ice crystals that shred his lungs to ribbons.

" _Lars_?!"

He thought he was whispering but when their heads lift, he realises he must have shouted. It's impossible to tell the nuances of expressions across the width of the rink, but Marian is already stepping down onto the ice on his side of the boards, scrambling, slipping and sliding across the smooth ice towards the two of them. A skater whizzing past him nearly collides with him, and there are alarmed cries, but he pays no attention; not to them, not to the slippery surface of the ice. All he sees are their faces, Lars' alarmed, Jenny's just blank.

He slams into the boards next to them, sweating despite the cold, and gasping for air. The young skaters have stopped their practice, drawing together in a small circle of whispered excitement and curiosity halfway across the rink. Jenny doesn't admonish them; seems to have forgotten they're there. She's staring at Marian, not smiling anymore. Apart from the hushed whispers of the skaters and his own harsh breathing, the silence is deafening.

Eventually, Lars clears his throat and takes a step towards him. "Marian," he says, "are you okay, man?"

Marian slaps aside the hand that reaches for him. In dozens of countries, through dozens of weeks, he's thought about a million things to say when he finally finds Jenny: honest, heartfelt, passionate things, things that will move her to tears. Yet now that she's two arms' lengths away, the first thing that pops into his mind is not for her, but for Lars. "What have you done to Stella, you bastard?"

Their expressions shift at the same time. Jenny's goes from stunned to alert and cold; Lars' face darkens into something private and resentful. He drops his hand. "Stella and I broke up a while ago. Amiably."

"Bullshit!" he spits. "She'd have told me!" But even as he says it, he chases rapidly down the murky alleys of his memory, trying to remember all the calls he ignored when he drank himself into a stupor each night; all the messages he deleted without listening to them.

Lars looks at him without responding, and then Jenny finally speaks, her voice polite and impersonal. "What are you doing here, Marian?"

He shakes his head, trying to get rid of what must surely be a mirage: Jenny, here, with Lars. "I came looking for you. I've been everywhere… all over the place. I came to tell you…" But all the things he wanted to tell her seem to have shrivelled and slunk away in shame sometime between the moment when he saw her and this one, when she exchanges a glance with Lars. It's brief, but the silent dialogue it carries is crystal-clear to him:  
 _Awkward.  
-Yeah._

Seeing it, his confusion turns to fury. "You lied to them!" he accuses her. "To all of us! Your parents… me… how could you do that, Jenny? How could you?"

Her eyes have narrowed in a way he knows all too well. It's the Jennifer Steinkamp death glare, the one that has _don't you dare_ written all over it. Her voice is calm, though. For now. "I needed a new start, Marian. There was nothing left for me there."

He sputters, gestures at Lars. "And him?"

She only shrugs lightly. "No offence, Marian, but what's between Lars and me is none of your business. You and I have been over…" she hesitates, then adds with the slightest tint of sadness, "for a long time, really."

Guilt, pain and anger clench his fists, propel him forward. Lars moves with astounding quickness and grace for so large a man, stepping smoothly between him and Jenny, blocking him. "You better back off, buddy."

"I'm not your buddy," Marian snarls at him, and around him, to Jenny, "Jenny, you can't be serious. You're with him? This guy? After everything that's happened?"

They both look at him in silence, Jenny still and guarded like a cat, Lars an unrelenting bulwark between them.

The fight goes out of him as quickly as it came, leaving him with a semi-nauseous feeling of jetlag and defeat. "And now?" he asks, hating how small his voice sounds, hating Lars, hating her. Hating himself.

She shrugs. "Go home, Marian."

"And before you do, try the vodka," Lars suggests, with a dark smile. "They have great vodka here."

He stares, stunned, at Jenny's expression, so cool and unremorseful. Hunting for something to say, anything that will tell her how wrong she is, how cruel and selfish and _wrong_ , he eventually manages nothing more than his old adage, the one he knew would always cut. "You will never change," he croaks.

Jenny's hazel eyes grow sharp as splintered amber, but she doesn't react or move, and the words that once felt as dark and potent as a curse to him sound curiously powerless in this foreign country, on this foreign ice.

It's Lars who answers him, the faintest trace of pity in his otherwise impassive face. "Marian," he says, almost gently, "she doesn't need to."

~~~

He leaves Russia on a Tuesday, via the Trans-Siberian Railway, with the taste of bad coffee and baffled regret in his mouth, and from all the telephone wires flashing past the train, the straggle-feathered crows are cawing _Aptal, Aptal_ , which is nonsense, of course, because Russian crows don't speak Turkish. He sleeps, and wakes, and sleeps again, and when he finally wakes up in some new train station in some new country, he has no idea what day of the week it is at all.

~~~


End file.
